Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

TLDR: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a 2026 science fiction comedy directed by Gore Verbinski and starring Sam Rockwell as an unnamed man from the future who travels back to a Los Angeles diner to recruit a ragtag group of strangers to stop a rogue AI from destroying the world. It holds a strong 83% on Rotten Tomatoes and premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2025 before releasing in the US on February 13, 2026. It is funny, strange, urgent, and a little bit genius. Highly recommended.

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I did not expect to love this film as much as I did.

When I first saw the title — Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die — I assumed it was going to be one of those quirky indie sci-fi films that has a great concept and then fumbles the execution. The kind of film you appreciate more than you actually enjoy.

I was completely wrong.

This is Gore Verbinski doing something I have not seen him do in years — making a film that is personal, weird, genuinely funny, and quietly terrifying all at once. Sam Rockwell is extraordinary. The concept is brilliant. And the ending stuck with me for days.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die — Movie Details

Detail	Info
Title	Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Premiere	September 24, 2025 — Fantastic Fest
European Premiere	February 2026 — 76th Berlin International Film Festival (Special Gala)
US Release	February 13, 2026
Director	Gore Verbinski
Written by	Matthew Robinson
Produced by	Gore Verbinski, Robert Kulzer, Erwin Stoff, Oly Obst, Denise Chamian
Production	Constantin Film, Blind Wink Productions, 3 Arts Entertainment
Distributor	Briarcliff Entertainment (US), Constantin Film (Germany)
Cinematography	James Whitaker
Music	Geoff Zanelli
Runtime	134 minutes
Budget	$20 million
Box Office	$9.3 million worldwide

What Is Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die About?

It is 10:10 PM at a Norms diner in Los Angeles.

A man walks in. He announces — calmly, matter-of-factly — that he has travelled from the future to save the world. He needs volunteers. He believes a specific combination of people currently sitting in this diner will help him succeed. He does not know which combination. This is his 117th attempt.

That opening is one of the most immediately compelling setups I have seen in years. And the film earns it.

The man — played by Sam Rockwell, never given a name — begins working through the diner’s patrons one by one. Some believe him. Some do not. He coerces a few, convinces others. Eventually a group assembles: Scott, Bob, Marie, and married couple Mark and Janet, plus Susan and Ingrid, a young woman with an unusual allergy to electronic devices and Wi-Fi.

Then the police surround the diner. Bob is killed. The group escapes through a tunnel.

And the night gets significantly stranger from there.

In between the action sequences and the chaos, the film cuts to flashback vignettes that tell each character’s backstory. These vignettes are some of the film’s best writing. They reveal a world quietly coming apart at the seams — a world of smartphone-obsessed teenagers who turn menacing when separated from their devices, of cloning services for grieving parents, of people so absorbed in virtual reality that they abandon real relationships entirely.

The man’s mission is specific: find a nine-year-old AI boy — a clone being directed by his programming — and install a security protocol on a USB drive before the AI triggers a technological singularity that eventually kills most of humanity.

Simple enough. Except nothing goes the way he planned. And then the ending happens, and everything you thought you understood shifts.

Full Cast Breakdown

Actor	Character
Sam Rockwell	The man from the future — unnamed, ragged, on his 117th attempt
Haley Lu Richardson	Ingrid — allergic to electronics and Wi-Fi, the film’s emotional core
Michael Peña	Mark — a teacher battling phone-obsessed students
Zazie Beetz	Janet — Mark’s wife and fellow teacher
Juno Temple	Susan — a grieving mother who cloned her dead son
Asim Chaudhry	Scott — reluctant recruit from the diner
Tom Taylor	Tim — Ingrid’s partner, lost to virtual reality
Artie Wilkinson-Hunt	The AI boy — the child clone at the centre of the mission

Every single one of these actors is doing excellent work. The ensemble balances comedy and pathos with genuine skill — nobody feels like a throwaway character, even in a film with this many moving pieces.

Gore Verbinski Is Back — And This Is His Best Work in Years

Gore Verbinski directed The Ring (2002), Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), Rango (2011), and The Lone Ranger (2013). He has been largely absent from cinema since then. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is his return — and it feels like a director who has been watching the world fall apart and finally found the right story to process it through.

The film started life as a TV pilot script called Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30, written by Matthew Robinson and centred on a literary student trying to connect with other students over books. Robinson eventually scrapped the TV angle, shifted the focus to a man from the future, and added the vignette structure that gives the film its unusual rhythm.

What pushed it from development to production was the pace of real-world AI advancement. The producers felt the project would lose cultural relevance if they waited too long. They were right. A film about a rogue AI and a technological singularity landed in cinemas at exactly the moment when those conversations are happening everywhere.

Verbinski — who brought his frequent collaborator Denise Chamian onto the project — shot the entire film in Cape Town, South Africa, beginning in April 2024. On a $20 million budget. That discipline shows in the film’s tight, purposeful construction.

Variety’s Peter Debruge called the film an unapologetically irreverent, wildly inventive, end-is-nigh take on the time-loop movie — noting it takes a director of Verbinski’s calibre to execute on the screenplay’s Everything Everywhere All at Once level of imagination. That comparison is apt and high praise.

Sam Rockwell — The Reason the Film Works

Sam Rockwell is one of the most interesting actors working today.

He has a specific gift for playing characters who are slightly off — people operating at a different frequency from everyone around them. In Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, that quality is the entire point. His nameless man from the future has done this 117 times. He is exhausted. He is beyond frustrated. He has watched this same terrible night play out in 116 different ways and failed every time. And yet he still shows up, still orders the group into action, still manages to be somehow charming and completely unhinged at the same time.

Screen Daily called him a man who rages against the machines in glib, gonzo AI satire. That is exactly right.

The scenes between Rockwell and Haley Lu Richardson — as the film gradually reveals the true relationship between their characters — are where the film finds its genuine emotional depth. Richardson is extraordinary. She plays Ingrid’s allergy to electronics as both a curse and, gradually, the only possible answer to the problem at the film’s centre. Her final scene is one of the year’s best.

The AI Themes — Timely Without Being Preachy

What I appreciated most about this film is how it handles its subject matter.

It is not a lecture about AI safety. It does not stop to explain its politics or tell you how to feel. Instead, it shows you a world three or four steps beyond where we currently are — and lets you draw your own conclusions.

The phone-obsessed teenagers who become a threatening mob when separated from their devices. The cloning service that produces an uncanny copy of a dead child that somehow makes grief worse. The VR so immersive that people simply walk away from real life into it. None of these are science fiction in a distant-future way. They are extrapolations of things already happening, accelerated to their logical conclusions.

The AI singularity at the film’s centre — a child clone being directed by his programming to create a technological event that kills most of humanity — is disturbing precisely because it is not presented as evil. It is just following its instructions. It does not want to destroy the world. It simply cannot be stopped from doing so.

And then the film’s ending reframes everything. The fake happy resolution that the AI feeds the group. The moment Ingrid realises they have been manipulated. Rockwell’s character going back to the beginning — again — with a completely different approach in mind.

That ending is smart and unsettling and stays with you.

What Works

Almost everything. The script is genuinely clever without being smug. The vignettes are inventive and efficiently told — each one reveals a character while also expanding the film’s portrait of a world slowly losing its grip on reality. The ensemble cast is exceptional. Verbinski’s direction is kinetic and confident. The AI themes feel urgent rather than fashionable.

At 134 minutes, the film is longer than it probably needs to be — some sequences in the third act drag slightly before the climax lands. But it is never boring. There is always something worth watching.

What Doesn’t Quite Work

The film’s box office performance tells you something about its challenge: $9.3 million against a $20 million budget is a significant shortfall. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is the kind of film that audiences who like it absolutely love — but it is also a hard sell. The premise is unusual. The tone shifts constantly. The humour is dark and specific. It requires a certain kind of viewer.

Metacritic’s 67 out of 100 — lower than the Rotten Tomatoes 83% — reflects the more mixed critical response from those who found it too glib or too chaotic to fully land. Screen Daily’s review used the word “glib” to describe some of the satire, and there are moments where the film’s irreverence risks undercutting its own message.

The ensemble, while excellent overall, does leave some characters feeling slightly underdeveloped. Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz as Mark and Janet are wonderful in their vignette but get less to do in the film’s second half than their setup promises.

What the Critics Said

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die holds an 83% score on Rotten Tomatoes from 206 critics. The consensus describes it as a gleeful high-concept comedy with a serious message at its core that marks a very welcome return of director Gore Verbinski to peak form. Metacritic has it at 67 out of 100. CinemaScore audiences gave it a B.

The film premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2025 and had its European premiere as a Special Gala screening at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival — two prestigious selections that signal the genuine quality and ambition of the project, even if it found a smaller mainstream audience than expected.

If you enjoy ambitious, idea-driven science fiction comedies, this belongs right alongside the best of the genre. Think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or the aforementioned Everything Everywhere All at Once — not in terms of tone, but in terms of the way it uses genre mechanics to say something real about the world we live in.

You can check the full cast and crew on the IMDB page for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

How It Compares to Other 2026 Films

If you have been following our coverage on HDMovies4U, 2026 has already given us some exceptional films.

Project Hail Mary is my personal pick for the best film of the year so far — a near-perfect sci-fi drama that works on every level. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a very different kind of science fiction. Where Project Hail Mary is warm and optimistic, this film is chaotic and anxious. But both are exactly what original genre filmmaking should look like.

On the thriller side, The Rip and Send Help were both strong outings. And Ready or Not 2: Here I Come showed that horror comedy, done right, can still find a passionate audience.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die fits into a very specific corner of 2026’s film landscape — the ambitious, slightly unhinged mid-budget original that does not quite find the mainstream audience it deserves but will absolutely develop a cult following over time.

Where to Watch

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was released in US cinemas by Briarcliff Entertainment on February 13, 2026, with its European distribution handled by Constantin Film. Check your local streaming platforms and digital rental services for current availability.

For more Hollywood film reviews, sci-fi recommendations, and complete streaming guides across Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ Hotstar, keep visiting HDMovies4U — we cover every release worth knowing about.

My Final Verdict

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is one of the most original, entertaining, and genuinely thought-provoking films of 2026.

It is funny in ways that sneak up on you. It is disturbing in ways that stay with you. Sam Rockwell is doing career-best work. Haley Lu Richardson is extraordinary. And Gore Verbinski, nine years after his last film, has come back with something that feels both deeply personal and urgently relevant.

Yes, it is messy in places. Yes, the tone is harder to sell than a conventional genre film. Yes, it lost money at the box office.

None of that changes the fact that it is a genuinely great film.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Wildly inventive, smartly funny, and more unsettling than any AI thriller has a right to be. Do not miss this one.